SMS Guidelines for Somalia

SMS Guidelines

Do I need to register a sender ID before sending SMS?

In most major markets, yes. Registration is mandatory in the United States (10DLC), India (DLT), and across the Gulf (sender-ID whitelisting), and it is best practice everywhere else even when not strictly required. Plan the registration timeline up-front — it is almost always the gating step before a campaign can go live.

What is the difference between GSM-7 and UCS-2 encoding?

GSM-7 packs seven bits per character and fits 160 characters in a single SMS segment, covering basic Latin text. UCS-2 uses 16 bits per character and fits 70 characters per segment. The moment a single emoji, an accented letter, or a smart quote appears in the message, the whole message switches to UCS-2 and the per-segment budget drops from 160 to 70 — often doubling or tripling the delivery cost.

How do I handle opt-out properly?

Treat the keywords STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, END, CANCEL and QUIT (plus the localised equivalents in your audience's language) as opt-out signals. Remove the number from the programme immediately on receipt, send a single confirmation message, and require a fresh opt-in if you ever want to message that number again. Continuing to send after a STOP is the single most common cause of complaints and regulator action.

Why are some of my messages not being delivered?

Carriers filter messages for content classifiers, throughput limits, URL reputation, sender-mismatch, and complaint rates. A "delivered" response from the API only confirms the message was accepted by the route — it does not always mean it reached the handset. The per-country guideline pages list the most common filtering causes in each market.

Can I send marketing SMS in the EU and UK without explicit consent?

No. Both GDPR + ePrivacy in the EU and PECR in the UK require prior opt-in for marketing SMS to individuals. A narrow soft opt-in exception applies to existing customers contacted about similar products, but the scope is tight and varies by member state. Treat opt-in as the default and rely on soft opt-in only with local legal sign-off.

How long does it take to provision a US short code?

Typically 8–12 weeks end-to-end, including carrier vetting. 10DLC campaign approval is faster — often 5–15 business days — but caps per-campaign throughput. Short codes give the highest deliverability and throughput for high-volume programmes; toll-free verification sits between the two for one-way notification traffic.

Can OMARA-style sentiment analytics be applied to SMS traffic?

Yes. Inbound SMS replies and conversation history can feed the same unified-customer-view and sentiment-scoring pipeline that OMARA applies to WhatsApp and Voice. The guideline page for each country notes whether two-way SMS is supported on that route — a prerequisite for receiving the replies in the first place.

Are OTP and authentication messages exempt from DND lists?

In most regulated markets, yes — OTPs ride a Transactional / authentication routing class that explicitly bypasses promotional DND registers (India's NCPR, Nigeria's 2442, the UK's TPS). The exemption is conditional on the message actually being authentication — banking codes, login confirmations, signed-action verifications. Any promotional language inside the body strips the exemption and the operator re-classifies the route.

What's the difference between promotional and transactional SMS routing?

Two distinct routing classes with different operator priorities, DND treatment, and per-segment pricing. Transactional / OTP routes get priority delivery, no DND filtering, and 24×7 sending; the per-segment rate is usually the lowest. Promotional / marketing routes go through quiet-hour gates, DND scrubs, and content review; rates are higher because operators carry the consent-management overhead. Mismatching content to route (a promo on a Transactional header, an OTP on a Promotional header) is the single most common cause of silent drops + sender-ID suspension.

Do marketing SMS face quiet-hour limits globally?

Almost everywhere, though the window differs. India enforces 9 PM–9 AM IST for promotional SMS; Nigeria's NCC restricts 8 PM–8 AM local; the Gulf countries restrict 9 PM–7 AM; the EU has no codified window but evening complaint volume is high enough that 8 PM–9 AM is the de-facto standard. Transactional / OTP traffic is exempt from quiet hours in every market we operate in. Build the quiet-hour window into the campaign scheduler, not the send loop — a campaign that spills across the boundary logs violations for the last batch.

Can I send OTPs and marketing from a single sender ID?

Strongly discouraged in any DLT-style market (India, the Gulf, and increasingly across Africa). Sender IDs are registered against a single header category — Promotional or Transactional — and the operator enforces it. A "shared" sender ID is either silently re-categorised by the operator (and the wrong-class traffic gets dropped) or suspended on the first complaint. Segregate sender IDs by traffic class even where the regulator doesn't strictly require it; the operational hygiene pays back the first time a marketing campaign would otherwise have throttled your OTP queue.

Why does my Promotional SMS bypass DND on some networks?

A few possibilities. (1) The destination operator runs a smaller DND list than the national register and the recipient is opted-out only at the national level. (2) The recipient gave a fresh, recorded explicit opt-in for that specific programme — most DND frameworks allow explicit-consent overrides. (3) The sender ID is mis-registered as Transactional and the operator is treating the message as exempt. The third case is the one to chase — it looks like a delivery win but invites operator-level suspension when the mismatch is caught.

What counts as a "Service" SMS (as opposed to promotional or transactional)?

Service SMS sits between promotional and transactional. It's used for messages tied to an existing customer relationship that aren't strictly authenticating the user — delivery confirmations, appointment reminders, account-state updates, fraud-prevention alerts on a transaction the customer initiated. In most markets Service traffic is DND-exempt (because the customer relationship implies consent) but doesn't get the priority routing reserved for authentication / OTP traffic. India splits this further into Service-Implicit (implied consent) and Service-Explicit (recorded opt-in for that specific programme).

Why are government SMS routed on a separate class in some countries?

A few regulators (India is the most explicit) reserve a dedicated header class for government, public-sector, and statutory bodies — in India it's the -G suffix. The route gets priority delivery SLAs, tighter sender-ID verification, and bypasses every DND register since the use case (public-health alerts, election-day comms, emergency broadcasts, regulatory notifications) is treated as essential. Private companies can't register on this class even when they run government programmes under contract; they route the same traffic on a transactional or service header with the agency's sender-ID branding instead.